Word: concertina
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Corps near Saigon. The camp was hastily installed last January to block a vital junction in the Viet Cong's "Saigon River" infiltration route from Cambodia. Two weeks after the offensive began, no fewer than 800 Communist troops stormed Landing Zone Grant, charging through three rows of concertina barbed wire. In the battle, a rocket crashed into the command post, killing the base commander, Lieut. Colonel Peter Gorvad. Last week, armed with machine guns, satchel charges and flamethrowers, they tried again. This time the Americans were waiting; cranking down their huge 105-and 155-mm. guns, they opened...
Budgie Bill is not one of your ordinary English tramps. Wearing a fawn-colored overcoat with wing collars and an ancient trilby that looks like "a burst concertina," he haunts villages in the daytime and cities at night. More startling, he always walks backward and, if he pauses in his perambulations, he lies down instead of sitting...
...people who want him now were not there when he needed them. Born in Puerto Rico, the second of eight brothers, he was raised in a Manhattan slum after his father gave up farming to find a job in New York City. Jose learned to play the concertina at six and the guitar at nine. The advent of rock 'n' roll in the 1950s inspired him to try singing, too. At 17, he began plying the coffee-house circuit from Greenwich Village to Chicago's Old Town, combining folk music with rock, standards and novelties...
...home was a palm-frond shack in Ba The, a tiny Mekong Delta village 25 miles from the nearest U.S. settlement. Carrying all his worldly possessions in a wheat sack, Gitelson traveled the back canals of the Delta in sandals and faded Levi's, entertaining peasants with his concertina and instructing them in the modern farming methods he had picked up as an honor student at the University of California at Davis. The peasants called him My Ngheo-the poor American...
...shoulder to shoulder in their trenches, bunkers and fighting holes all around the half-mile-wide perimeter. Everything in Khe Sanh is dug in, even the trucks: when not rolling they are parked radiator-deep in inclines bulldozed into the red clay. A morning inspection of the rolls of concertina wire circling the camp is mandatory: one night a squad of North Vietnamese crept up, neatly cut a passage through for future use, and replaced it to look as though nothing had been disturbed. Each day, as they wait, the Marines dig in deeper, filling shiny grey sandbags and adding...